Maureen Myant interview

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

A little introduction:

Hi, my name is Maureen Myant. I live in Glasgow with my husband and have three adult children and six grandchildren. I was an educational psychologist until I retired.

When did your love of books begin?

About the age of six I think. My mother always read to me when I was a young child and my dad made up stories and also told me folk tales from Ireland where he came from. The first book I read by myself was my older brother’s and was, of course, by Enid Blyton. It was one of the adventure series, The Valley of Adventure. I adored it and from that moment I was obsessed with books. The library was a brilliant resource and I was there at least twice a week. You were only allowed three books as a child member and I was a fast reader!

When did you start to have the wish to become an author?

Probably about the same time as I fell in love with books. As soon as I realised that people wrote books and that they didn’t come from the ether fully formed, I thought 'I could do that’ and immediately started to write my own story. Unfortunately my mother called me in from the back garden where I was writing and I left the piece of paper to be blown away in the wind.

How have you found the process for becoming an author?

Lengthy. As I said earlier, I wanted to be an author from about the age of six but other things got in the way. School, university, career, family all came first. I was in my forties before I began to write seriously. I did an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University in 2001 to 2003 and it was then that I started to realise that I could write. Getting published is another matter of course. I naively thought that the difficult part was the actual writing of a novel. No. First you need an agent. I got one and thought ’this is it.’ But even then you have disappointment after disappointment. I was very lucky with the agent I had for my first novel The Search. She persisted with offering it to publishers after many agents would have given up. The feedback from editors was unanimously positive but there was always someone in marketing who would say they didn’t know how to market it. Thankfully a publisher did take it on eventually. You might think that having one book published would make it easier to get a second one out there but once again it was a hard slog. My second novel was taken up by a small Glasgow publisher but they went into receivership before it could be published.  Hobeck Books took my next novel which was published last November (2022).

What would you say to those wanting to become an author?

First of all, read. Every writer I know reads a lot. Secondly write every day. It doesn’t have to be your magnum opus, it could be your journal, notes for an idea you have, thoughts on books you have read. Any of those things. Thirdly be prepared for rejection. A tiny minority of writers are successful from an early age but most writers will get numerous rejections so you have to be thick skinned and resilient. I read today that of every hundred people who start writing a book, around 3% will finish it and 0.06% will get published. 

Tell us about your book/books:

My first novel The Search is set in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany during WW2. In June 1942 the village of LIdice, near Prague, was destroyed by the Nazis as retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich the brutal Protektor of Czechoslovakia. All males over the age of fifteen were executed, the women were sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Most of the children are thought to have been killed at the Chelmno while a small number were sent to Germany for Aryanisation because they were young enough and blonde enough to pass as Germans. Many German families adopted Aryanised children from Czechoslovakia and Poland not knowing their true origins. The Search imagines what might have happened to two of these children.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Maureen-Myant-ebook/dp/B0B1MKPJ2W/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ACK2LUWX84N1&keywords=the+search+maureen+myant&qid=1672612474&sprefix=the+search+maureen+myant+%2Caps%2C77&sr=8-1

The Confession is a psychological/crime novel set in contemporary Glasgow. It is the first in a series. A woman is found dead in her house in a Glasgow suburb. On her laptop is a confession to five murders but when the police investigate they conclude that it’s nonsense. Then the murders begin and the Detective leading his case finds himself more and more embroiled in the case, personally that is!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BKGV6N88/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_4RQGTVB770YSP45MZSH8?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

What do you love about the writing/reading community?

Writers and readers alike are so supportive.

If you could say anything to your readers what would it be?

Thank you! Writers need readers. We thrive on their enthusiasm for books.

Where can people connect with you?

I’m on Twitter @maureenmyant and I’m also setting up a website www.maureenmyant.com but be warned, it’s a work in progress.